xvi, 392 pages ; 24 cm

This book investigates the private worlds of sexual dissidents during the pivotal decades before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The author revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. This book reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority

Includes bibliographical references and index

pt. I. Same-Sex Eros in Modernizing Russia -- 1. Depravity's Artel': Traditional Sex Between Men and the Emergence of a Homosexual Subculture -- 2. "Our Circle": Sex Between Women in Modernizing Russia -- pt. II. Regulating Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia -- 3. Euphemism and Discretion: Policing Sodomites and Tribades -- 4. The "Queer Subject" and the Language of Modernity: Reforming the Law on Same-Sex Love Before and After 1917 -- 5. Perversion or Perversity?: Medicine, Politics, and the Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent After Sodomy Decriminalization -- 6. "An Infinite Quantity of Intermediate Sexes": The Transvestite and the Cultural Revolution -- 7. "Can a Homosexual Be a Member of the Communist Party?": The Making of a Soviet Compulsory Heterosexuality -- pt. III. Homosexual Existence and Existing Socialism -- 8. "Caught Red-Handed": Making Homosexuality Antisocial in Stalin's Courts -- 9. Epilogue: The Twin Crucibles of the Gulag and the Clinic

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